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Next year, we will mark the 30th anniversary of the term “guerilla marketing.” Yet, three decades after Levinson published his seminal book on the subject (Guerrilla Marketing, Houghton Mifflin), many business people – even those in marketing – are hard pressed to clearly explain what the term means, much less apply it to something as narrowly focused as community colleges. The concept is simple: If you’re not a BIG business, Madison Avenue doesn’t care about you. What’s more, the marketing practices they prescribe for their BIG business clients won’t work for you. If you want to be successful in an increasingly competitive marketplace, you’re going to have to stop fighting in an arena you can’t afford: traditional advertising. You’re going to have to fight your fight in the trenches. Unglamorously. And that may mean swallowing your pride.

We seem to get a lot of questions from local businesses about Guerrilla Marketing: how it works, how much it costs, whether it’s “beneath” a reputable business, and so on. So we thought we’d take a moment to answer some of those questions and maybe expose a few myths.